"That's the only difference," he agreed with a slight bobble of his head.
"Sex tourism," Matt echoed with a laugh. "There's better ways to make money then working for them. I haven't come close to a 'normal' existence since I was alive and even then, the normal is archaic to nearly everyone I meet. Much better, in my opinion, to spend your days building a little empire that will earn you money and spending some of that money on the most beautiful company that one could buy.
There's not much of normal living that I find palatable anymore, but I exist out of those times, nowdays. Is Texas even with the rest of the modern world? I haven't ever been - always kept to the coasts."
"Not this part of Texas," Cassidy said with a snorting laugh. "Bloody hell. They barely even had a Starbucks, d'you know what I mean?"
He contemplated Matt's face — the face he was still learning to associate with not Jesse — while he lowered his hands into his lap. He'd be holding onto the pipe, until such time as Matthew reached for it again.
"You must've had some run-ins with the sort of people who don't take kindly to what we are. Right? Four hundred years." At least. Matt had mentioned the 1600s, so he must have already been of an age in that century. "That's a hell of a long time to escape notice."
Matt scoffed, not doubting Cassidy's word in the slightest. The idea of a place like that existing at all was almost hilarious except he knew it was still true.
Quaint, really.
"Call it five hundred, I'm only a decade off." A dismissive wave of a hand came with it, despite the creeping look of pride in his eyes and the tilt of his smile that faded as he continued.
"Five centuries of knowing my place, is what it was. My world, our vampires, there's a lot of us and we've got our own society. Goes back to the dark ages. The Crusades? A full out offensive attack on the Kindred who thought they had the right to exist in the open, purging our kind in fire and sunlight, and countless humans who dare be accused by others to even know of us. Rules were set in place to protect us. Rules that get you killed if you break."
Matt took a shallow pull from his glass, shaking his head as he adjusted in his seat. It was a dark topic but that was his life. Any vampire's life and Matthew didn't expect or want any sympathy.
"So yes, I have, but I'm not ashamed to say how I handled it. Kill or be killed. A nasty business, cleaning up those messes, and I've been forced to run for my life.." He paused like he was counting and then added with a cheeky grin, "... though some messes involved avoiding the husband of very handsome housewives and high windows. The better times of it all, if you ask me."
He reached out then, gesturing for the pipe.
"Your place in Texas sounds like mine in Arizona. Empty, simple and mostly quiet when some new, passing neighbor kicks up dust?"
There was no pity in Cassidy's expression as he listened, and only a small measure of sympathy. Mostly, there was bemused curiosity. Kindred. Society. Those words in particular alluded to a world that was entirely foreign to him, and that he couldn't help finding suspect. Too many vampires in one place... well, there was a reason he preferred the company of mortals.
The bit about housewives and windows was met with a twitch of a smile, a breaking of the tension. Cassidy leaned forward to pass the pipe over, as silent and casual as Matthew had been in his request.
"You paint an accurate picture there, mate," he said as he sat back again, taking up his whiskey and resting the glass on his knee. "Quiet people livin' their quiet lives. I'll take normal —" His definition of normal, which he'd been quite comfortable with in Vegas, "— but quiet is just a coupla bridges too far. And there I am, expected to lay low in this nowhere of a place. It coulda been torture."
He took a slow sip from his glass, contemplating the various ways he might've gone mad if he hadn't been able to squirrel out the interesting corners of Annville.
"Laying low is only tolerable if you have someplace to 'lay high' at. Paris was always my go to, until I was kicked out. Russia isn't bad either, though there are souls up there that would eat us alive for the fun of it and to stick the finger to the rest of them in principal.
Nice and quiet is a good cover. Too bad there aren't any holes or high ground here to throw ourselves around on. At least for me."
For all the fancy words and societal constructs, the Kindred were only a step above savage and not all of them had even that much. Matthew loved the rough and smooth contrast of them though, it echoed the life they all tried so desperately to recreate.
"No goin' off the grid here." That was the truth. Cassidy settled back with a shifting of his shoulders, head tilted back so he could look up toward the ceiling.
"Or. We're as off the grid as you can go. Bloody fairies."
Fairies and angels and whatever else. Jesus. Cassidy sat with that a moment, until he felt a bubble of humor rising out of the situation.
"Me mother warned me about the aos sí takin' me away. D'you think this is what she meant?"
In the course of the last question, his look of squinting curiosity turned into a grin.
Matt had to laugh at that, shaking his head as he took another pull from the pipe before handing it over.
"Perhaps it is. Though I daresay there's been much more opportune times. I was tidying things up in Russia when they nabbed me - could have used them getting out of the stocks at least once or twice.
For the French, it was never the Fairies. It was the bears from the woods, and the English. Always the damned English," he said with another laugh as he sat back, sighing softly to himself.
"I suppose we should be grateful for the sun alone though, hmm?"
"The damned English," Cassidy echoed with a low laugh. "That's a classic in either accent, is it not?"
He surrounded himself with another thin cloud of smoke while he thought over the gratefulness question.
"The sun, and a few other things." Opium was feeling pretty high up on the list, at the moment. And there was more than just that. Cassidy rolled his head to face Matt, a frown pulling at his lips.
"Matthew." Could he get serious with you, for a moment? "I consider myself as much a gentleman as any boy from Dublin City, which is to say not much of one at all, but. I respect women, right? I don't do nothin' that hasn't been asked for, or I haven't paid for. I don't take advantage. And I understand the circumstances of this place are fairly fucked up, so there's the context for what I'm gettin' at: I'm not certain I've ever so many non-professional women say 'yes' to me in so short a time. And I went to bloody Woodstock!
"Not to mention there's bloody Star Wars characters walkin' about. Place is unbelievable."
Matt chuckled. "It's easy when they've always been assholes."
He stood, hands absently patting himself down before he found a small box of cigarettes, popping it open to pull out one obviously hand-rolled cigarette and sitting down again, rolling the cylinder between his fingers with a hum of attentive acknowledgement.
Of course he could.
The laugh was a slow growing one, starting from his chest and breaking through him with deeper sound as the easy smile spread into a grin.
"You're not exactly an ugly man, mon ami, and we are in the place for it. There are firsts for everyone, I'm sure." Including him.
"Please tell me you met Obi-Wan Kenboi. He was my favorite."
"No. What? No." Cassidy sat forward as abruptly as he could, which was already not all that abruptly, and fixed Matthew with a look of incredulity. "Ben Kenobi is not here. Tell me you're gettin' ready to pull the other one."
...oh. Oh, wait, hang on. Matthew meant that Obi-Wan was his favorite from the movies.
"...unless you haven't seen him either, and you was just askin'. Right." He sat back again with a wave of his hand. "No, no. It was Padmé. Queen Amidala from the bloody prequels. I think I scared her off. Said to meself, I had to draw the line at science-fiction characters. That's too much. But apparently not."
Cassidy knew he'd been here for weeks. His powers of memory retention weren't so shot that he couldn't ground himself in the passage of time. But there were still moments where this almost felt like an ongoing hallucination.
"Although," he went on, leaving the metaphysical questions aside for now, "I will say if Ellen Ripley were to turn up here, you would not hear me complainin'."
"Wha-" Ever easily swayed, Matt couldn't help but perk up a little, running over things in his head in fragments that would do him no good anyway and nodding as Cassidy came around to the right idea, crooked smile lazy in its pull.
"Hey now, if we are drawing lines at Sci-fi, let's not invite Aliens in. I don't even have my sword and I would not want to think about trying to fuck one of those things." Despite the laugh that came with the inflection.
"I'd much rather the disco Valkyrie from Conan. Let's get her."
"Oh, Jesus, no, not the damn aliens," Cassidy returned the laugh with a morbid glee, and moved pipe and lighter into one hand so he could bend down for his glass of whiskey. He drank while considering Matthew's counter-offer.
"Mm. Yes. Good one." Although Ripley had been his first thought, he had to concede that inviting even the concept of those aliens into reality wasn't the best idea. Who else could he conjure up?
"Ooh. No. I've got me choice. Barbarella. Gorgeous, sexually insatiable, hero of the galaxy. There's a get for the fairies." He lifted his glass toward the ceiling. "Hear that? Request made."
Matt cemented there that he liked Cassidy. Far too many people were insistent to whine about where they came from or what they had going on that very very few had stopped to take a moment of time to think about the sheer possibilities of the place.
As silly as inviting trouble might be.
Matt groaned in a needy agreement. "Seconded. Jane Fonda can hold me up at any point she pleases. Though I will say there are a tragic number of beautiful women who aren't known due to lack of movies. Especially French women. Mm, our girls are the best, I'd wager on it."
Cassidy frowned. "I guess this is the part where I'm meant to defend Irish lasses, but honestly, one of the greatest loves of me life was a Frenchwoman in New Orleans, so. I'm not takin' that bet."
He drained his glass, partly so he could put it down and hit the pipe again.
"I like the Irish - firey. Hell with a broomstick, too. There was a.. .a wee girl," he started, taking on a very good Irish accent for the last bit, "who I got quite enamored with. Worked at the local tailor shop with eyes like the sky and skin like satin.
I'd say even her mother was pretty, as she beat me out of their barn," he finished with a laugh. "Can't say I've had that from any French mothers, though plenty of busted lips and gunshot wounds from their husbands."
"International Playboy." Cassidy made a presentational gesture in Matthew's direction. "That's the vibe I'm gettin'. Beddin' women in every nation across the globe. Probably jumped away from a few explosions. Vampire James Bond. Am I on the money there?"
"If I can help it," he said without an inch of shame and an air of confidence in his broad smile. "A few men, if they strike my fancy but that's more rare than anything. What I'd give to be James Bond though," he said with a light laugh.
"I hunt, when I'm asked to, doing the work of the court with my sword and hammer, and when I'm not, it's all stocks and moving numbers. Nothing quite as exciting as anything that comes out of spy novels, unless you count running from angry husbands as such.
And you then, do you work or is it a free floating existence?"
"You won't find me workin' for no courts. Not even if they would let me use a sword." Because that did sound pretty awesome.
"Mostly I spend Seamus's money. He's the one with the ambition. But I will work for the extra cash, when I need it. Or if the job's fun enough. Which is how I wind up chaperonin' bachelor parties to Mexico." For example. "But I don't need much... never did. Long as there's enough money to buy drugs, and the occasional jaunt to the whorehouse, everything else is extra."
"No? Well, being carved out in front of them for not is worse." There was a tinge of guilt about it all. Matthew was far from bloodthirsty and he hated such useless loss of life but he did as he was commanded.
"I admit we've been trained a bit.."
He needed another hit and took a deep one.
"I've always had a taste for the finer and gallivanting among them. I can't do that off odd jobs, nor would my sister have let me I dare say. Enjoy your freedom, mon petit chou, it is a blessed thing."
"If I've been flyin' under the radar of some official vampire society all these years, I've got more luck than I been accountin' for."
Cassidy had been assuming that he and Matthew were from the same world. He still wasn't entirely sure that wasn't the case... but the things that didn't quite match up were starting to mount. How many different realities could the fairies reach into? How many Earths? How many different versions of Paris or New Orleans or Texas? Were they really different, or was it all some mess of quantum physics, each world a single still frame of a fractal?
These were fairly bog-standard stoned thoughts, and a good sign that the opium was doing its work. They were also hitting Cassidy in a whole new way, given his fresh real-life perspective on multiple realities. For a long moment, he allowed the thoughts to swirl around and through his head, one of his knees bobbing idly side to side as he stared up at the ceiling.
"We should have some music, next time," he said — a stray, passing thought in the middle of all those metaphysics. Music always made the high better.
"You certainly are." He wasn't going to spoil Cassidy with the dark, dirty details, especially with the light, airy feeling of the drugs in his system. He was half melted in his chair, head rolling back with a sigh as he let his limbs relax and settle.
This is what he'd needed. Well, part of what what he needed.
"Mmm, depends on what kind. I'm boring and in love with what's called 'Classic' now, I suppose." Alexander was always the 'hip' one. "What do you like?"
"Oh, me, sure, I could do classic rock." Not his absolute first choice, but he wouldn't say no to it. "The Stones. AC/DC. The Who. Definitely."
Always a safe bet to start with those more conventional, less embarrassing options — though Cassidy was just relaxed enough to dip a toe into other waters.
"You know who's great in pop now, though, is Carly Rae Jepsen."
The look Matthew gave him could only be described as confused horror.
"Savage," he accused dramatically before laughing. "Further back, ya heathen. I don't even know what that means, 'pop'. Most recent thing I can say I've listened to with purpose is.. One of the Billies. Joel or.." He wiggled a couple of fingers absently, "Idol."
"Honestly, I could not tell you," he said with another chuckle. "Music is the least attended to of my tastes. Now Theater - that's a different story. I do love to catch a show or three. At least their names tend to be memorable.
Oh, Elton John isn't bad either, though I think of him less often then I should in this subject.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 07:18 pm (UTC)"Sex tourism," Matt echoed with a laugh. "There's better ways to make money then working for them. I haven't come close to a 'normal' existence since I was alive and even then, the normal is archaic to nearly everyone I meet. Much better, in my opinion, to spend your days building a little empire that will earn you money and spending some of that money on the most beautiful company that one could buy.
There's not much of normal living that I find palatable anymore, but I exist out of those times, nowdays. Is Texas even with the rest of the modern world? I haven't ever been - always kept to the coasts."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-09 10:15 pm (UTC)He contemplated Matt's face — the face he was still learning to associate with not Jesse — while he lowered his hands into his lap. He'd be holding onto the pipe, until such time as Matthew reached for it again.
"You must've had some run-ins with the sort of people who don't take kindly to what we are. Right? Four hundred years." At least. Matt had mentioned the 1600s, so he must have already been of an age in that century. "That's a hell of a long time to escape notice."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-10 01:55 am (UTC)Quaint, really.
"Call it five hundred, I'm only a decade off." A dismissive wave of a hand came with it, despite the creeping look of pride in his eyes and the tilt of his smile that faded as he continued.
"Five centuries of knowing my place, is what it was. My world, our vampires, there's a lot of us and we've got our own society. Goes back to the dark ages. The Crusades? A full out offensive attack on the Kindred who thought they had the right to exist in the open, purging our kind in fire and sunlight, and countless humans who dare be accused by others to even know of us. Rules were set in place to protect us. Rules that get you killed if you break."
Matt took a shallow pull from his glass, shaking his head as he adjusted in his seat. It was a dark topic but that was his life. Any vampire's life and Matthew didn't expect or want any sympathy.
"So yes, I have, but I'm not ashamed to say how I handled it. Kill or be killed. A nasty business, cleaning up those messes, and I've been forced to run for my life.." He paused like he was counting and then added with a cheeky grin, "... though some messes involved avoiding the husband of very handsome housewives and high windows. The better times of it all, if you ask me."
He reached out then, gesturing for the pipe.
"Your place in Texas sounds like mine in Arizona. Empty, simple and mostly quiet when some new, passing neighbor kicks up dust?"
no subject
Date: 2018-01-10 04:01 pm (UTC)The bit about housewives and windows was met with a twitch of a smile, a breaking of the tension. Cassidy leaned forward to pass the pipe over, as silent and casual as Matthew had been in his request.
"You paint an accurate picture there, mate," he said as he sat back again, taking up his whiskey and resting the glass on his knee. "Quiet people livin' their quiet lives. I'll take normal —" His definition of normal, which he'd been quite comfortable with in Vegas, "— but quiet is just a coupla bridges too far. And there I am, expected to lay low in this nowhere of a place. It coulda been torture."
He took a slow sip from his glass, contemplating the various ways he might've gone mad if he hadn't been able to squirrel out the interesting corners of Annville.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-19 06:33 pm (UTC)Nice and quiet is a good cover. Too bad there aren't any holes or high ground here to throw ourselves around on. At least for me."
For all the fancy words and societal constructs, the Kindred were only a step above savage and not all of them had even that much. Matthew loved the rough and smooth contrast of them though, it echoed the life they all tried so desperately to recreate.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 04:14 am (UTC)"Or. We're as off the grid as you can go. Bloody fairies."
Fairies and angels and whatever else. Jesus. Cassidy sat with that a moment, until he felt a bubble of humor rising out of the situation.
"Me mother warned me about the aos sí takin' me away. D'you think this is what she meant?"
In the course of the last question, his look of squinting curiosity turned into a grin.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-20 11:20 pm (UTC)"Perhaps it is. Though I daresay there's been much more opportune times. I was tidying things up in Russia when they nabbed me - could have used them getting out of the stocks at least once or twice.
For the French, it was never the Fairies. It was the bears from the woods, and the English. Always the damned English," he said with another laugh as he sat back, sighing softly to himself.
"I suppose we should be grateful for the sun alone though, hmm?"
no subject
Date: 2018-01-21 05:32 am (UTC)He surrounded himself with another thin cloud of smoke while he thought over the gratefulness question.
"The sun, and a few other things." Opium was feeling pretty high up on the list, at the moment. And there was more than just that. Cassidy rolled his head to face Matt, a frown pulling at his lips.
"Matthew." Could he get serious with you, for a moment? "I consider myself as much a gentleman as any boy from Dublin City, which is to say not much of one at all, but. I respect women, right? I don't do nothin' that hasn't been asked for, or I haven't paid for. I don't take advantage. And I understand the circumstances of this place are fairly fucked up, so there's the context for what I'm gettin' at: I'm not certain I've ever so many non-professional women say 'yes' to me in so short a time. And I went to bloody Woodstock!
"Not to mention there's bloody Star Wars characters walkin' about. Place is unbelievable."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-22 10:39 pm (UTC)He stood, hands absently patting himself down before he found a small box of cigarettes, popping it open to pull out one obviously hand-rolled cigarette and sitting down again, rolling the cylinder between his fingers with a hum of attentive acknowledgement.
Of course he could.
The laugh was a slow growing one, starting from his chest and breaking through him with deeper sound as the easy smile spread into a grin.
"You're not exactly an ugly man, mon ami, and we are in the place for it. There are firsts for everyone, I'm sure." Including him.
"Please tell me you met Obi-Wan Kenboi. He was my favorite."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-22 11:04 pm (UTC)...oh. Oh, wait, hang on. Matthew meant that Obi-Wan was his favorite from the movies.
"...unless you haven't seen him either, and you was just askin'. Right." He sat back again with a wave of his hand. "No, no. It was Padmé. Queen Amidala from the bloody prequels. I think I scared her off. Said to meself, I had to draw the line at science-fiction characters. That's too much. But apparently not."
Cassidy knew he'd been here for weeks. His powers of memory retention weren't so shot that he couldn't ground himself in the passage of time. But there were still moments where this almost felt like an ongoing hallucination.
"Although," he went on, leaving the metaphysical questions aside for now, "I will say if Ellen Ripley were to turn up here, you would not hear me complainin'."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-23 01:34 am (UTC)"Hey now, if we are drawing lines at Sci-fi, let's not invite Aliens in. I don't even have my sword and I would not want to think about trying to fuck one of those things." Despite the laugh that came with the inflection.
"I'd much rather the disco Valkyrie from Conan. Let's get her."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-23 04:13 pm (UTC)"Mm. Yes. Good one." Although Ripley had been his first thought, he had to concede that inviting even the concept of those aliens into reality wasn't the best idea. Who else could he conjure up?
"Ooh. No. I've got me choice. Barbarella. Gorgeous, sexually insatiable, hero of the galaxy. There's a get for the fairies." He lifted his glass toward the ceiling. "Hear that? Request made."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-25 07:13 pm (UTC)As silly as inviting trouble might be.
Matt groaned in a needy agreement. "Seconded. Jane Fonda can hold me up at any point she pleases. Though I will say there are a tragic number of beautiful women who aren't known due to lack of movies. Especially French women. Mm, our girls are the best, I'd wager on it."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-28 03:40 am (UTC)He drained his glass, partly so he could put it down and hit the pipe again.
no subject
Date: 2018-01-28 10:33 pm (UTC)I'd say even her mother was pretty, as she beat me out of their barn," he finished with a laugh. "Can't say I've had that from any French mothers, though plenty of busted lips and gunshot wounds from their husbands."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-28 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-30 05:40 pm (UTC)"I hunt, when I'm asked to, doing the work of the court with my sword and hammer, and when I'm not, it's all stocks and moving numbers. Nothing quite as exciting as anything that comes out of spy novels, unless you count running from angry husbands as such.
And you then, do you work or is it a free floating existence?"
no subject
Date: 2018-01-30 10:22 pm (UTC)"Mostly I spend Seamus's money. He's the one with the ambition. But I will work for the extra cash, when I need it. Or if the job's fun enough. Which is how I wind up chaperonin' bachelor parties to Mexico." For example. "But I don't need much... never did. Long as there's enough money to buy drugs, and the occasional jaunt to the whorehouse, everything else is extra."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-31 12:59 am (UTC)"I admit we've been trained a bit.."
He needed another hit and took a deep one.
"I've always had a taste for the finer and gallivanting among them. I can't do that off odd jobs, nor would my sister have let me I dare say. Enjoy your freedom, mon petit chou, it is a blessed thing."
no subject
Date: 2018-01-31 07:29 pm (UTC)Cassidy had been assuming that he and Matthew were from the same world. He still wasn't entirely sure that wasn't the case... but the things that didn't quite match up were starting to mount. How many different realities could the fairies reach into? How many Earths? How many different versions of Paris or New Orleans or Texas? Were they really different, or was it all some mess of quantum physics, each world a single still frame of a fractal?
These were fairly bog-standard stoned thoughts, and a good sign that the opium was doing its work. They were also hitting Cassidy in a whole new way, given his fresh real-life perspective on multiple realities. For a long moment, he allowed the thoughts to swirl around and through his head, one of his knees bobbing idly side to side as he stared up at the ceiling.
"We should have some music, next time," he said — a stray, passing thought in the middle of all those metaphysics. Music always made the high better.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-03 05:37 pm (UTC)This is what he'd needed. Well, part of what what he needed.
"Mmm, depends on what kind. I'm boring and in love with what's called 'Classic' now, I suppose." Alexander was always the 'hip' one. "What do you like?"
no subject
Date: 2018-02-04 07:32 pm (UTC)Always a safe bet to start with those more conventional, less embarrassing options — though Cassidy was just relaxed enough to dip a toe into other waters.
"You know who's great in pop now, though, is Carly Rae Jepsen."
no subject
Date: 2018-02-04 08:54 pm (UTC)"Savage," he accused dramatically before laughing. "Further back, ya heathen. I don't even know what that means, 'pop'. Most recent thing I can say I've listened to with purpose is.. One of the Billies. Joel or.." He wiggled a couple of fingers absently, "Idol."
no subject
Date: 2018-02-05 12:18 am (UTC)And those were two very different artists Matt was name-checking. Cassidy let the laugh roll into a chuckle.
“Well, what was he singin’ about? Was it all about dancing and rebellion, or was it about bein’ a New Yorker, or possibly a fisherman?”
no subject
Date: 2018-02-05 06:45 pm (UTC)Oh, Elton John isn't bad either, though I think of him less often then I should in this subject.
What do you listen to? Just.. 'pop'?
(no subject)
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